Horizons Ventures focuses on investing in disruptive and technology-focused start-ups. The firm was founded in 1999 and is based in Hong Kong. Some of the latest exits are Skype, Siri, Facebook, Summly, and Waze.

Horizons Ventures

Fifty Years is a venture capital firm that backs founders using technology to solve the world's biggest problems.  Entrepreneur-run and based in San Francisco, Fifty Years invests in companies that inspire. Specifically, they fund companies that, if successful, will be both massively profitable and make a serious dent in achieving one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Fifty Years

Temasek Holdings is a lender provider. The company offers debt financing and focuses on transforming economies, increasing middle-income populations, developing comparative advantages, and emerging champions. Financial services, transportation, industrial, consumer, real estate, telecommunications, media, technology, and life sciences are among the industries served by the firm.

Temasek Holdings

AgFunder invests in impactful companies that can positively transform the world's food system. Founded in 2013, AgFunder manages a portfolio of over 50 companies across four funds from offices in Silicon Valley and Singapore. Through its media platform AFN, it has built a global ecosystem of over 90,000 subscribers.

AgFunder

From spiraling healthcare costs, to the rise of chronic diseases, to feeding a growing global population, the world is facing a complex web of interrelated challenges. iSelect was created to help solve these problems, connecting investors with the innovative companies that are fixing the food and health systems while opening up access to investment opportunities that are making a real impact on the future of our world.

iSelect Fund

S2G Ventures is a food and agriculture venture fund that invests in entrepreneurs whose products and services meet the shifting demands for healthy and sustainable food. The firm's mission is to catalyze innovation to meet consumer demands for healthy, sustainable, and local food. S2G will identify sectors across the food system that are ripe for change, and form a multi-stage portfolio including seed, venture, and growth-stage investments. It seeks to invest in agriculture, ingredients, infrastructure and logistics, food safety and technology, retail and restaurants, and consumer brands. S2G Ventures was established in 2014 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

S2G Ventures

Continental Grain Company is dedicated to working with its existing agricultural businesses pursuing strategic opportunities in protein-based businesses while taking advantage of new investment opportunities. Established in 1813 as a grain trading firm based in what is now known as Arlon, Belgium, Continental Grain Company grew to become one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Through its diversified operations and investment activities, Continental Grain Company builds long-term value in partnership with exceptional management teams. The Company's goal is to attain financial success in ways that reflect favorably upon its employees and business partners. With a rich entrepreneurial legacy and significant permanent capital, Continental Grain Company continues to seek new global growth opportunities across the food and agriculture landscape through its various investment groups, including CGC Ventures, Corporate Investments, and its middle market investment group, Arlon.

Continental Grain Company

Germin8 Ventures is a multi-stage venture capital firm investing in disruptive Food & AgTech companies across the value chain, in various stages, globally. It is a group of like-minded industry veterans and sophisticated investors providing investment and strategic resources to transformative Food & Agriculture Technology companies that are addressing major demand trends and improving the global food system through disruptive technologies and solutions.

Germin8 Ventures

VamosVentures is a venture capital fund that invests in Latinx and diverse founders leading early-stage tech-enabled companies in the United States across Health + Wellness, Future of Work, FinTech, and Sustainability.  VamosVentures seeks to generate financial returns and deliver meaningful impact through wealth creation, social mobility, and creative solutions. The fund will lead, co-lead, or participate in funding rounds.

VamosVentures

Lewis & Clark AgriFood is a group of experienced investors, scientists, operators, and owners who are passionate about investing in companies that are at the forefront of food and agriculture innovation. They look for companies that deliver benefits to the stakeholders in the food and agriculture sector, from the producer, through the supply chain, all the way to the consumer. The firm invests in companies that are at the growth stage of their evolution, poised to scale their technology to a national or global scale.

Lewis & Clark AgriFood

All things space & survival. We are focused exclusively on space, defense & human survival. We partner with global tech leaders on their mission to build and protect the future cities on Earth and in space. In the complex sectors of space, defense and human survival, we believe no other firm offers the depth and breadth of domain expertise, experience and mission-critical advice to achieve best-in-class results for our clients. Our relentless pursuit of excellence in our specialization and impact is unrivaled in the industry. https://astorperkins.com/

Astor Perkins

Managers — Sriram Krishnan, Cindy Bi, Jens Lapinski, Anthony Pompliano, Kat Cole, Tim Chen, Julia Lipton, Tommy Leep

Angel Collective Opportunity Fund

Brightseed

Brightseed is a pioneer in biosciences and artificial intelligence that illuminates nature to restore human health. Through Forager® A.I. and clinical evaluation, Brightseed helps companies gain the deepest insight into bioactives and their innovation potential. Forager A.I. accelerates bioactive discovery and biological validation from years to months – and is rapidly revealing new connections between nature and humanity. Brightseed partners with companies across the consumer health continuum to provide novel insights and science-backed health solutions.  Bioactives are small molecule compounds produced by plants, fungi, and microbes that grow in and adapt to environments that present a wide range of challenges to their survival. Bioactives also benefit the health of humans – they are the enlivening caffeine in tea, the powerful antioxidant lycopene in tomatoes, and they inform active ingredients in medicines like Taxol, Aspirin, and Metformin, a first-line treatment for Type 2 diabetes, derived from the French lilac flower. Science has long known that bioactives are critical to human health, yet the vast majority remain unknown and uncharted. Brightseed’s A.I., Forager®, discovers bioactives in nature and maps them to human health outcomes at a rate and accuracy that was previously impossible.

<div><p>Brightseed is a privately held data company that reveals hidden compounds in plants and offers them in markets across industries. The company&rsquo;s AI technology, Forager, is a digital platform that reveals the interactions between plant bioactives and human biology. The technology is capable of predicting bioactive plant compounds and their implications on health. It has paved the way for the discovery of caffeine, natural pain relievers, and cancer drugs, and has mapped 1.2 million more plant compounds. The company serves the dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food &amp; beverage, specialized ingredients, consumer health, animal health, and personal care industries.</p></div>

Enhancing seed and crop traits via biotechnology

Crop Biotech

Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods and Brightseed® Introduce New

Danone

Danone SA and biosciences company Brightseed have expanded their partnership and now will work globally to accelerate Danone’s development of plant-based products

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    Brightseed is a privately held data company that reveals hidden compounds in plants and offers them in markets across industries. The company&rsquo;s AI technology, Forager, is a digital platform that reveals the interactions between plant bioactives and human biology. The technology is capable of predicting bioactive plant compounds and their implications on health. It has paved the way for the discovery of caffeine, natural pain relievers, and cancer drugs, and has mapped 1.2 million more plant compounds. The company serves the dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food &amp; beverage, specialized ingredients, consumer health, animal health, and personal care industries.
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<p><span>Lone Star Industrial Materials is a cultivation company that manufactures raw hemp materials. Its product portfolio consists of bast fiber, refined cellulose, and hemp hurd, seeds, hearts, fines and oil. Additionally, it offers retail products such as HempSorb, animal bedding, and hemp control socks. Hemp requires less land, improves nutritional health, is environmentally friendly, helps soil regeneration, grows in various climates, absorbs a great deal of CO2, is a rotational crop and reduces waste. Hemp is used in construction, insulation, bioplastics, and as hemp wood. The privately held company has developed an end-to-end supply chain from seed genetics to delivery.</span></p>

Lone Star Industrial Materials

<p><span>PLANTeDIT operates in the plant genome editing field to produce improved crop species through transformation technology and a CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system. It produces regulatory-free, consumer-oriented, DNA-free and sustainable genome edited crops and biopharmaceuticals. The company’s offering includes non-transgenic high oleic soya, which is produced by mutating the FAD2 gene, which eventually increases the oleic oil content in the soya bean. This product was developed through a collaboration between PLANTeDIT and ToolGen. The organization has also collaborated with RebelBio, University College Cork and IAPB. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, PLANTeDIT is privately held.</span></p>

PLANTEDIT

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    Amforo is a biotech company that focuses on developing foods that are high in protein by enhancing the nutritional density of food and feed crops through the platform of technologies it has built. The company offers a family of feed and food crops, including primary ingredients for suppliers of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. In addition, it is focused on developing a low-cost, plant-based source of protein for farmed seafood. Moreover, Amforo is pursuing approaches to enhance the nutritional profile of crops as well as their protein content, which entails optimizing amino acid profiles, modifying carbohydrates, and enhancing micronutrients.
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Amfora

<p><span>BioHeuris provides weed management solutions by combining synthetic biology and gene editing to develop herbicide resistant crops. Its offering includes Heurik, a technology platform that integrates rational design and directed evolution to identify mutations that confer herbicide tolerance, while Swap is the platform that introduces these mutations in crops using gene editing. The company cultivates soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, and alfalfa. It has partnered with Santa Rosa Semillas, Adecoagro, Gensus, GDM, Aceleradora Litoral, Tobin, Rotam, Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Benson Hill, and Plant Science Center. Headquartered in Rosario, Argentina, BioHeuris is privately held with an office in the US.</span></p>

BioHeuris

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    Tropic Biosciences is a privately held developer of high-performing commercial varieties of tropical crops that promote cultivation efficiencies, improve sustainable environmental practices and enhance consumer health through its use of cutting-edge genetic editing technologies. Its GEiGS Technology combines gene editing and RNAi in a single platform that enables critical disease resistance and quality improvement traits. The technology caters to the banana production, row crops, livestock, and poultry industries. The company’s partners include Temasek, Agronomics, Polaris Founders Capital, and Excellence Through Stewardship. Headquartered in the UK, Tropical Biosciences has been featured in The Telegraph, Nature, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. 
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Tropic Biosciences

Companies that develop or use biological, physical and chemical agents and techniques to provide protection and improve the quality of a seed. This includes the sale of seed coating, or seed enhancement products as methods to treat seeds.

Companies that redesign large clusters of genes and gene parts rather than modifying or engineering a single gene for improving the traits of a plant.

Companies that utilize genetic engineering tools and technologies to use existing and naturally present gene variants in a plant and the natural process of breeding such as inbreeding, and linebreeding to develop better traits for plants.

Companies that use transgenesis processes like tissue culturing to develop transgenic plants or seeds by inserting new genes into them from other plants or in certain instances other organisms like bacteria or even animals.

Companies that offer techniques such as epigenetics, RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily block a specific gene that would trigger unwanted effect such as a disease on a plant.

Companies that develop a platform to insert, edit, or delete the DNA of a plant itself using approaches such as CRISPR-Cas 9, TALENs, and Zinc Fingers. These approaches help develop plant genes or seeds with traits such as disease-resistant, enhanced-performance, or improve yield.

Biotech solutions to produce crops that are sustainable and offer better traits

Offers customization of genes and traits as required by farmers

Uses AI/machine learning to facilitate their platform/biotech processes like gene editing

Brightseed

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